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Give your Business Users Voice

One way to know what people are saying about your company or products is to have a place where people can post their opinions and ideas.

Similar to Get Satisfaction (covered in my last post), UserVoice provides a forum for customers to post their ideas, opinions and ideas. Once a company sets up a profile, their customers are asked directly for their input at the top of the page which says “I suggest…”. Each idea can be voted and commented on by the entire community. Companies can leave an official response and mark each idea with a status: planned, started, declined, or completed. Ideas can be searched for or browsed by top, new, accepted and completed. Customers can also add ideas free form from a widget that companies can place on their website or blog.

UserVoice is geared towards customer feedback and ideas, but lacks tagging, related issues, general discussion and a tie-in to a larger community. However, segregating the forum for each company could allow customers to feel more comfortable leaving their feedback. Voting on ideas is another valuable feedback, but without negative votes, you only know how many were for it (everyone else either abstains or doesn’t care). UserVoice is still in beta (free for now) so it will be interesting to see how their features develop over the next few months.

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UserVoice
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Ruby on Rails: My advice

Lets continue our theme of Ruby on Rails reviews with the advice I give clients thinking of trying out RoR for a project.

My first piece of advice when evaluating a new language or technology is for a company to get dirty early on; get at least one small project under your belt before reaching out to a consulting group. Sure its strange advice from a consultant but it’s grounded in solid personal experience. Companies that have had first hand experience with a product or language are often more comfortable with the advantages and limitations of said product or language. That means their expectations are correctly grounded in reality. Here are some expectations that I’ve found to be true through personal experience:

  • Rails is good for delivering dynamically generated textual content over the web. Really good, actually. Really really good.
  • Rails is not as good at maintaining session state as other languages, such as Java Swing. This makes it a poor platform to replace that desktop accounting app. Better to look at a Java Hybrid product like Oracle Application Server with Forms and Reports.
  • Rails can handle Interactive Media, but not as well as Adobe Flex.
  • Rails can do AJAX well but the Scriptaculous tends to be a weighty download. It is cache-able, though so your experience may differ. I prefer JQuery Having said that, the RJS libraries in Rails makes writing JavaScript much less painful.
  • If something is working in one language, don’t redo it in Rails just to keep the source code in one silo. If PHPBB works for you, great! Stick with it.
  • The Rails Persistence layer ActiveRecord is very cool. It can greatly simplify database access for new users. However, don’t expect it to solve all data access woes.

My second piece of advice is to break the Test Once Live habit. This one is a tough sell since people love the time saved in development using Dynamic Languages and loath the trade off spent writing solid tests. Here is the reality, your application will run just well enough to get everyone excited about it. It will also fail you the moment you show it off to someone you want to impress. Here are some testing tips that I have learned the hard way.

  • Write RSpec tests before you show it to anyone. RSpec, once you learn it, can be the stories given to a consultant. We’ll love ya for it.
  • Do end user testing with JMeter and FireBug. JMeter will to load testing and FireBug will tell you more about what your browser is getting from the server.
  • Once you have a working application start running AutoTest on startup. Let it sit in the background and just forget its there. Then, when you have the last second really important change you need to make before 8AM, it can catch and alert you to a test failure before you find out live.

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Do your customers have satisfaction?

Knowing what people say about your company is pretty important for maintaining your brand image and quality of service. The Internet allows people to easily post opinions, problems and reviews. How do you know what people are saying about your company?

One way is to provide a forum where people can go to post reviews, problems, questions, etc. Get Satisfaction provides neutral ground for this conversation, which you can easily link to your website. Anyone can startup a conversation about a product or company, but if you own the company you can claim them (Get Satisfaction then verifies your claim). Once you’ve claimed or started a conversation, you can represent your company as an official representative or just an employee. More importantly, you can interact in an official manner with your customers and potential customers to provide your own side to any problems, questions or issues. As a customer-centric company you should take this input in order to improve your products or services and then interact with the community to get their continued feedback.

Besides linking or creating a badge to the conversation from your website, Get Satisfaction also provides the ability to add topic widgets in order to increase the visibility of your customer support conversation. These topic widgets can be customized by topic, order, number, summaries, etc. and you have have multiple widgets if you want to target different topics. Anyone can add their own customized topic widgets to their own sites – allowing your customers to increase visibility of the conversation as well. If you insist on keeping the conversation on your own website, an API is provided for integration with your site.

Conversations are organized by products, tags, questions, ideas, problems, and talk and can also be identified by recently active, latest and unanswered. Replies to the conversation can be rated by the participants so you can quickly get an idea of the overall emotion of the community to any particular idea – information that has previously been the realm of in-person focus groups.

For companies looking for a quick and easy way to interact with customers, Get Satisfaction can offer a great deal of functionality for free. However, keep in mind that the company is still in beta and hasn’t yet decided on how they will make money. Obviously without a business plan, the company may also disappear at some point – but right now, according to The NYTimes, they have comments on over 2,000 companies with 40% of the companies responding.

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